Archive for March, 2010

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is calling for a strong re-assertion of states rights against Congress — in the form of a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the direct popular election of Senators, and go back to the pre-17th Amendment setup of state legislatures appointing them.

“Ever since the safeguard of State legislatures electing U.S. Senators was removed by the 17th Amendment in 1913, there has been no check or balance on the Federal power grab for the last 97 years,” Gohmert said in a press release, calling for a constitutional convention of the states. “Article V requires a minimum of 34 states to request a Convention which in this case, would be an Amendment Convention for only ONE amendment.”

And once again, the mainstream miscalculates how many Senators would be indirectly elected. Dan Weigel incorrectly reports:

For what it’s worth, Democrats currently control 27 state legislatures, so this would be a pretty bad deal for them at present, sending them back to 54 senators. Media Matters Action has video and points out how this conflicts with the “Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, thus health care reform should die” argument of a week ago.

He is pretty close though. Democrats would have at least 54 seats. No idea how Nebraska or some tied legislatures would go.

Well, the Billikens bombed in Atlantic City in the A-10 Tourney. They hoped for an NIT bid, but didn’t get it. Now as I await the announcement of the College Basketball Invitational teams, I share some Google trends.

In anticipating the NIT announcements, someone started a thread on Billikens.com titled NIT Selection Show. Google picked up this thread for its search engine, and for most of the day, it was the 3rd item that came up when you searched for NIT Selection Show. Well, the Billikens.com servers paid for that tonight. Here is a Google trend graph for “NIT Selection Show”

So as thousands of college basketball fans whose bubbles had burst googled NIT Selection Show, many came across Billikens.com. Before tonight, the most users that had been on the message board at one time was about 230. Tonight, we reached 437. Even on an upgraded server plan, we crashed a bunch.

The really interesting thing is to see the spike in people who searched for “College Basketball Invitational”. The NIT selection show ended at 9:30, and it seems people frantically hunted after then for another bubble to ride.

My guess is the x-axis is Pacific time. So as soon as the NIT Selection Show ended, Google got swarmed with CBI seekers.

Google called the above trends volcanic. The below is a preliminary graph of Billikens.com traffic tonight….Does sort of look like a Volcano.

Sorry if these Billikens.com posts are boring. The site has just been pretty interesting to me in the past month. Now, lets make the Billikens 2010 CBI Champions.

Update: SLU, GW, and Princeton all made the CBI. The final four could legitimately include each of those schools.

The Billikens have been on a little tear recently. They have won eight of their last ten. With that, Billikens.com started receiving more and more visitors. In about a weeks time, traffic increased by about 150%. This put some strain on my server, so I upgraded. Likely for next year, as the Billikids grow up, I will need to further upgrade, which substantially increase hosting costs.

For those of you that don’t know, Billikens.com is funded entirely through donations. The site has no ads or subscription fees. So the generosity of the users is what pays the bills. We have had a fundraiser every two or three years since 2003.

To pay for upcoming server costs, I started a fundraiser a couple of weeks ago. In the first week about $140 rolled in. In the next week, another $25 rolled in.

billiken_roy, a longtime poster and friend, thought this was outrageous and posted the following this morning

those of you that havent donated to the cause should be ashamed of yourself. $170 as of today? that is all that we have sent. i would assume most are at least sending $25 or more which would mean about 6 or 7 people are all that has donated thus far? if i was steve i would post a list of the donators to at least give some recognition to the few that have the decency to enable all to enjoy this site.

I saw this and I went to lunch. I came back, checked my email, and there were seven new donations. By the end of the day, there were eight more. And this does not include those who said they put checks in the mail. $430 hit my inbox today.

Billikens.com has been a tremendous hobby. There have been times in which I have thought of giving it up. There have been other amusing moments. I have been running a site devoted to SLU basketball since I was 12. It will be quite strange when I don’t. Regardless, days like today will always impress me.

Now lets see how many Billikens.com users read SteveRogers.info.

For a fun tid bit, in the last month Billikens.com received more traffic from (each) the US, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Ireland than SteveRogers.info did altogether. China came up just short.